First impression: MaddAddam in development for HBO

Today’s news that HBO will be adapting Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy comes with mixed feelings.

That it is HBO? Awesome, because that will mean the three novels (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam) will get space and time to unfold and be more fully realized than they probably could be as one, or even three, feature films, and definitely more fully than if they were to be developed for network TV.

Of course, there is the worry that my imagined Toby, Amanda and Zeb (my favorite characters in the trilogy, and characters who don’t appear until the second novel), aren’t the ones who will appear on the screen.

And then there’s Darren Aronofsky. I think he’s strange, brilliant and, too often, brutal. Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain were all hard to get through. The Wrestler was more toned down, and frequently humorous, which made it more effective. But Black Swan? Hugely overrated, melodramatic (without an emotional core) and shallow.

I haven’t seen his Noah yet, but it does make an interested parallel considering the second book in Atwood’s trilogy is “The Year of the Flood.”

So will his vision of MaddAddam be open to the rich humor of Atwood’s dystopian world — from the explicit satire of fast food “secret burgers” (they’re secret because you don’t know what the meat comes from) to the heartbreaking irony of how so many members of the apocalyptic cult God’s Gardeners actually survive the apocalyptic “waterless flood”?

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, please read my review of “Oryx and Crake” and stay tuned for my reviews of “Year of the Flood” and “MaddAddam.”

 

 

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s